Site Mobile Navigation

Fox’s Experiment in Animated Living

An animator at work in the Sunset Boulevard studios.Credit
Annie Tritt for The New York Times

LOS ANGELES — You can’t be totally sure which room in the rambling office space on Sunset Boulevard here might be cooking up the future of network prime-time animation, so Nick Weidenfeld does his best to be in them all.

One morning in April, he started by bouncing ideas back and forth with Dino Stamatopoulos, a stringy misanthrope with stringier hair — you may know him as Star-Burns on “Community.” They were working on ideas for episodes of his show “High School USA!”

Later, Mr. Weidenfeld shotgunned cans of La Croix sparkling water and mused over how difficult it might be to acquire the rights to “Living Single,” the 1990s sitcom that the Lucas Brothers, inspirations for and stars of “Lucas Bros. Moving Co.,” want to be watching in one episode of their show.

In the afternoon, Mr. Weidenfeld was in the recording studio, shepherding a bug-eyed and foul-mouthed Jay Johnston (of “Mr. Show” fame) as he did an endless stream of line readings for “High School USA!” with slightly different inflections each time.

Mr. Weidenfeld is the executive in charge of Fox’s Animation Domination High-Def — a play off its Animation Domination Sunday-night lineup, so let’s call it High-Def for short — a new animation programming block consisting primarily of quarter-hour episodes drawn from a roster of shows. It will make its debut July 27, a Saturday, from 11 p.m. to 12:30 a.m. Eastern and Pacific times (10 p.m. Central), a time slot that is more or less overlooked by all networks that don’t broadcast “Saturday Night Live.” With some inspiration from Adult Swim, the longtime block of nighttime young-adult programming on the Cartoon Network where Mr. Weidenfeld got his start in television, High-Def is seeking to redo not only Fox’s Saturday-night programming, but also the mechanics of American animation, producing locally and more cost effectively.

Photo

“High School USA!,” an offering from Fox’s new Saturday-night animation block.Credit
Fox

Depending on how you look at it, High-Def is either a low-stakes experiment in Internet-inspired content development, or one of the highest-profile rethinks by a major network of a chunk of its airtime in recent memory.

The block will have its debut with two new shows: “Axe Cop,” an anime-influenced series based on a Web comic written primarily by an elementary-school-age boy (with his older brother’s assistance), and “High School USA!,” which takes an Archie Comics-esque exterior and infuses it with dark, dirty humor. (The first episodes of each will be broadcast the Sunday before, July 21.)

The shows are the first elements of a long-term strategy to create something of a farm team for Fox’s long-dominant Sunday-night animation lineup, which, anchored by “The Simpsons,” has been the genre’s juggernaut.

Fox’s chairman for entertainment, Kevin Reilly, has committed to providing financing for three and a half years — one year of development and two and a half years of programming. In addition to the shows that make it to air, High-Def is trying to build a robust Web presence, with animated shorts and topical daily video snippets called GIFs.

“I don’t want it running through these halls — that’s a disaster,” Mr. Reilly said in his office on the Fox lot about seven miles from the High-Def office. “It’s got to have its own ethos.”

He added, “It’s the most fun I’m having, just because it is so unfettered, and everything else I do is like turning a barge.”

Photo

Ben Jones, left, Nick Weidenfeld and Hend Baghdady, executives on Fox’s Animation Domination High-Def block.Credit
Annie Tritt for The New York Times

Mr. Reilly has given a long leash to Mr. Weidenfeld, formerly head of development for Adult Swim. He and his team moved into the office on Sunset in January, and it houses an incredibly young staff. Mr. Weidenfeld said he had tried not to hire anyone who’d ever paid to consume television, preferring to understand his employees’ generational viewing habits as a means of learning how better to promote his shows.

Another morning, Ben Jones, the creative director, was leading a class on the graphics editing program Pixen for the young artists who work on shorts in the office annex next door. Every now and again, he’d make a 1990s reference — say, “Hangin’ With Mr. Cooper” — and it was generally lost on them. Still, so far the artists have proved quick studies; several were already promoted from the shorts team to the main shows.

High-Def can be thought of as a quick-strike response to the molasses-slow process of traditional animation, in which episodes are storyboarded more than a year before their air date. “That’s a long time to wait to see if your show is funny or not,” said Matt Silverstein, one of the in-house show runners. “Chances are it’s not. Then what do you do?”

Often, Mr. Reilly said, a second season has to be picked up before the first one even has its premiere. What’s more, most of the actual animating is outsourced, typically to South Korea, and in a scene out of “Das Kapital,” there is little collaboration among writers, storyboard artists and the animators.

“It’s incredible to be doing all the animation under one roof,” said Rich Arons, key animator for “Axe Cop.” “That really hasn’t happened, I’d say, in about 25 years in the U.S.”

In contrast to typical network series, Fox owns this content, which also means it free to distribute it however it like, or to let viewers do so. A signature of the High-Def Web site will be a simple GIF maker so fans can put together their own clips of the shows and share them on social media. Plenty of television shows do well in the GIF ecosystem, but generally those GIFs are made illegally.

Photo

From top, stills from the new shows “Axe Cop,” “Lucas Bros. Moving Co.” and “Golan the Insatiable.”Credit
Fox

But High-Def writers and animators are working with these sorts of sharing opportunities in mind — “moments inside the shows that become GIF-able moments,” Mr. Weidenfeld said. He speaks about the form like a zealot (“I have a vision for how our audience can engage with our content”) as well as an industrialist (“Especially because there’s no audio, it’s just an ad — all it is, is a promotional tool”).

To execute his vision, Mr. Weidenfeld assembled a team with flexible skills.

It includes Mr. Jones, the creative director, who got his start as part of the Paper Rad art collective, and a pair of show runners, Mr. Silverstein and Dave Jeser, veterans of “The Cleveland Show” and “Drawn Together,” who serve as utility players, patching holes, sometimes punching up scripts, sometimes guiding young talent through formulating plot.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

At Adult Swim, Mr. Weidenfeld’s first responsibility was to reach out to developers outside the traditional animation pipelines. Here, he’s working with untested talent as well: Joshua Miller, creator of “Golan the Insatiable,” about a warlord from another dimension who ends up exiled in Minnesota, had never worked in a writers’ room before, and the comically lethargic Lucas brothers (Kenny and Keith), despite some work on “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon,” still come off as if they’re just talking to one another, not for public consumption.

“Animation was better for us” than a live-action show, said Kenny, the talkier of the twins, though not by much. “We just have a lot of bizarre ideas.”

What the Lucas brothers’ show has in common with the rest of the High-Def programming is, Mr. Weidenfeld insists, a lack of cynicism. By contrast, Adult Swim was “not an optimistic channel,” he said.

High-Def will celebrate, he said, “the paramount importance of youth and love and friendship and hanging out and being awesome — not ironically awesome, just awesome.”

Photo

Animators at work in the Sunset Boulevard studios.Credit
Annie Tritt for The New York Times

High-Def still works with Fox oversight — the GIFs and shorts are still subject to vetting by the legal and standards and practices departments. But plenty of randy things make it through, an indication that Fox is willing to test boundaries for now.

Mr. Weidenfeld said, “You have a TV network saying, ‘We recognize not that television is dying but there’s a change, and we are investing in figuring out how to succeed in the new era.’ ”

Mr. Reilly is also rolling out a similar plan for live-action comedy development, and Fox recently announced a partnership with the YouTube channel Wigs, as part of a live-action drama development plan.

Even on the less-scrutinized real estate of Saturday nights — previous Fox programming has included “MADtv,” a direct “Saturday Night Live” competitor, and two talk shows, “The Wanda Sykes Show” and “Talkshow With Spike Feresten” — High-Def will have to contend with the usual pesky metrics: advertising dollars and ratings. Viewership, at first, is “not going to statistically look very big,” Mr. Reilly said.

Hend Baghdady, High-Def’s executive in charge of production, said: “It’s going to take at least a year for people to understand that they can tune in on Saturday nights. The majority of our audience on a Saturday night is, like, playing Xbox, partying with their friends.”

But advertisers will be there from the beginning, and not in the usual ways. As opposed to relying on 30-second spots, Fox hopes to sell the block as a whole via partnerships that include High-Def-created ads that will be stylistically consistent with the rest of the programming.

After Mr. Weidenfeld was finished recording Mr. Johnston, he headed back to his modest office for a meeting with representatives of a well-regarded podcast. They were pitching a show that had all the mature-animation hallmarks — adult-aimed content, well-known guest stars doing voice roles.

Mr. Weidenfeld was polite, said he’d read the proposal more closely. By old measurements, it felt like a sure thing, but it was hard not to feel that given what else had been happening in the building that day, it was in no way the future.

A version of this article appears in print on July 7, 2013, on Page AR1 of the New York edition with the headline: The Experiment In Animated Living. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe